RETHINKING ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT: A 360-DEGREE VIEW

As enterprises generate, accumulate, and store an
ever-increasing amount of data in numerous different
systems, it’s becoming clear that they need a new
approach to data management that reins in costs and
ensures data is available when and where it’s needed.
The need for improved enterprise data management
coincides with the trend toward the digitization of
businesses. On a global level, a recent report by the
McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) found the amount of
bandwidth crossing regional borders has grown 45
times since 2005 and is expected to increase another
nine times in the next five years. “Flows of information,
searches, communication, video, transactions,
and intracompany traffic continue to surge,” the report
says.
Enterprises are left dealing with the result of these
flows: more and more data of all types. Add to that
data generated within the enterprise’s own walls
– developer files, spreadsheets, images, audio and
video files, text documents, and so on. In its benchmark
report based on a study of 86% of Fortune 500
companies, the storage vendor Veritas found that data
is growing at a rate of 39% per year.
Interestingly, however, Veritas found that storage
capacity requirements are growing 9% faster than
companies are creating individual files. The reason is
companies are storing multiple copies of the same
files, probably on different storage facilities. That
points to a storage management problem on top of the
sheer data volume issue.